I've decided to post a short mix of songs that would fit on one side of a C90, every day, or as often as I can.
The songs will all be songs I have heard for the very first time that day.
They will be from all genres and from all histories of recorded music.
I will provide no information about any of the songs or the artists who wrote them, other than the year in which they were released.
It's done for love.

Saturday, 31 January 2009

31.01.09

The tritone paradox is an auditory hallucination – a kind of aural version of the Necker Cube. A pair of Shepherd tones (sets of octave-related sinusoids, with amplitudes scaled by a fixed bell-shaped spectral envelope based on a log frequency scale) are played sequentially with an interval of a tritone. This interval is interpreted as ascending by some people, and descending by others.

Interestingly, different populations and cultural groups were shown to favour different interpretations. Native speakers of Vietnamese heard the paradox differently from native English-speaking Californians. This is explained by different populations tending to favour different points around the chromatic circle as central to the set of ‘higher’ tones.

As this hallucination is powered by a tritone, it has a relationship to the diabolos in musica (literally, ‘the devil in music’), the dissonant tritone interval which was interpreted as ‘evil’ by the Vatican, and was allegedly banned from church music following Guido of Arezzo’s foundation of the hexachordal system. Church musicians found to be exploiting the dark energy of the interval were officially excommunicated.